June 14, 2024 • 65 mins
The conversation explores the connection between the landscape and the sky in the Andes, particularly in Peru. It delves into the astronomy and cosmology of the Inca civilization, focusing on their calendar system and their mapping of the stars to the physical geography of the earth.
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(00:00):
Alright, good morning Gary, or goodafternoon, how are you today?
I'm doing fine, thank you, how are you?
I'm doing well.
Like we were talking about just a littlePeruvian hiccups this morning with water
faucets and construction, but we're doingwell.
So, yep, I'm in the Sacred Valley.
(00:21):
So I'm in Huitxo.
And I think this is probably, I'm not toofar from where you were around here in the
70s.
I was just in...
I was in Lamai on Sunday for a wedding.
And so, you know, you reference Lamaiquite a bit in your book.
(00:45):
But...
on the hill up above the valley, so nearMaras.
And the village where I lived wasMishmanai, which is near the great
sinkholes of Morai.
Okay, right.
And is that near is that near Chinchero?
(01:07):
It's across the plain from Chinchero.
So when you look out from the villagewhere I was, Mishmanay, Chinchero is in
the distance and then beyond that you seethe hills above Cusco.
Right.
So it's all, yeah, it's within line ofsight of Chinchero.
(01:30):
And then in the other direction is thegreat Salinas that overlook the Sacred
Valley.
near Ollantaytambo.
huh, okay.
I still haven't made it up to Antitomboyet, but that's on my list in the next
month or so.
There's a very interesting family.
I wonder if they would have been here.
(01:53):
it's a shame.
I can't remember the guy's name, but hewas kind of an explorer, wrote a couple of
books on Andean mythology.
Randall, yes.
So I know his son here.
do you really?
Yeah, his son is here.
The family has the...
They still have the hotel and thedistillery.
(02:14):
The distillery is quite famous now.
They've won quite a few awards fordifferent medicinal plant kind of alcohols
that they distill up there.
But yeah, I was...
It's just unreal.
I was...
just digging through, you know, Andeanmythology.
And I come across this guy, Randall.
(02:36):
I'm like, wow, this guy's pretty rad, youknow?
And I'm starting to do some research, andthen I find his wife.
And then it's, they're talking about howthese, this family started this hotel.
And I'm like, that sounds kind offamiliar.
they have a distillery.
wait a second, I know that guy.
And so I know one of the sons who'sactually a quite renowned artist in Lima
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nowadays.
his work and I've corresponded with him.
And I mean, I don't think I've everactually met him.
The two boys were born, like they werejust babies when I was there.
But Randall, that's an interesting story.
He was an adventurer and an explorer andhe was quite knowledgeable about Andean
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matters.
And I don't know if you're aware, but heactually died.
He was bitten by his dog, a rabbit, whowas rabbit.
It was his own dog.
Right.
Yeah.
And so that was in the probably the end ofthe seventies, early eighties, something
like that.
And then his wife stayed on there with theboys and, and continued to run the hotel.
(03:48):
So, but they were quite.
the notable people around there in thoseyears and were quite famous.
They would come to Cuzco all in as a clanand were really interesting people.
Right.
I mean, as soon as I found out about them,I was like, because I met the son at a
separate kind of like barbecue, you know,four or five months ago, and it was just
(04:10):
clear like, man, this guy's got somejuice, you know what I mean?
Like that family's holding something quiteinteresting.
yeah.
Is the mother still there?
I believe she's in Lima.
I haven't met her before.
I believe she's in Lima for the most partand then the one son stays up there full
time.
They have the hotel, like a full organicrestaurant.
(04:33):
They have their own little organic farmthat supplies the restaurant and the
distillery going on up there.
But I did not know that he was bitten byit.
Because I believe what it said when I readthat he passed away young was that it was
from a tropical disease.
He was in my memory.
He was bitten by a rabid dog.
(04:55):
And I believe it was his dog.
It was the most surprising and tragicstory.
Yeah.
I mean, I could be wrong.
Ask his son.
He will surely know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a little sensitive, I wouldthink.
the thing is though is that being bittenby your own rabid dog in Peru would be a
(05:19):
highly likely scenario given that most ofus take in half street dogs, half home
dogs, and you never know what's going on.
So it's a very plausible situation tohappen here, no doubt about it.
possible scenario, right, right.
sure.
Well, so, I mean, I came to your workthrough all this study that I'm doing on
(05:41):
particularly weather forecasting,astronomy, animals, plants, things like
that.
And so you were here starting in, whatyear did you come to Peru to do field
work?
Well, I came first in 1973.
(06:06):
I came with Tom Zydema, who was a Dutchethno - historian who studied the Inca,
who was very interested in Inca history,Inca calendars, Inca ritualism.
You'll have to excuse the...
no worries.
(06:26):
the siren outside.
I'm in downtown Warsaw and there arecontinual sirens going by outside.
So I went first in 1971 and then I wentagain.
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That was just for some summer research.
Then I went again in 1973, stayed mostlyin Cusco.
And then it was not until 1975 that Iactually went to the small community of
Mismanai above the archaeological site ofMorai.
(07:08):
And I had done some research in Morai.
I was working there with an anthropologistnamed John Earls, a very famous fellow who
did work in...
looking at sort of Inka environmentalknowledge and how they constructed
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archaeological sites for agriculturalpurposes.
And he was interested in Marai thinking itwas an agricultural experimental station.
So we camped out there several months andthe village of Mishmanai was just above
and the women and children would come downand pastoring their cattle.
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down into the side of Moriah and we got toknow them.
So I got a grant from the Organization ofAmerican States in 1975 to do my field
work.
And so the only village that I really knewwas the village of Moriah.
So I just went straight there and asked ifI could have a room, if I could rent a
room.
And so the rest is, yeah, the long storyof then staying in the village, living
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there and...
working with the men in the village and asoften as I could, urging and encouraging
people to talk to me about the stars.
I was interested in astronomy, inastronomy and the calendar.
And just to back up a little bit, Imentioned that I worked with Tom Zaitema
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and that he was interested in the Incas,but he especially was
in those years in the mid 1970s interestedin reconstructing the Inca calendar system
to see if on the basis of the informationrecorded in the Spanish Chronicles if we
could reconstruct what must have been avery complex calendar system of the Incas.
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And so I worked with him and thendetermined when I started doing my field
work that well we didn't really know.
much at all about what people in thecountryside, the Quechua -speaking people
in villages around Cusco, what they saidabout the stars and the sun and the moon
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and the planets.
And so when I got my grant to do fieldwork, I decided that I would carry out a
study in the village and learn as much asI could.
about their astronomy, their cosmology,etc.
Okay, fascinating.
And so with the calendar work, theastronomy being a large missing piece,
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were there other pieces that were moreintact of the calendar that you guys came
to?
And then really quickly, just to clarify,I mean, would this be kind of a mishmash
of really, we would call it an Incancalendar for the sake of easy reference
point, but is it also likely that
(10:20):
a lot of the calendar is pre -Incan andlike a deep Quechua pre -Incan calendar
that would be really what you would find.
That's an excellent question.
I mean, it's a question that we don'treally know the answer to, but we presume
that the Incas didn't invent theircalendar whole cloth from nothing.
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I mean, they were living in a place wherepeople had been living for literally a few
thousand years and agriculture waspracticed in that region from very early
times.
Camelot herding.
Herdinghamas and Alpacas was also a partof the economy.
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And so going back to much earlier times,Wari times, for instance, the Wari, a very
famous pre -Inca empire from about 600 ADto 1000 AD, they had settlements, sites in
what would become the region of thecapital city of
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Cusco, the capital of the Inca Empire, theWari had occupied that area and then even
people before the Wari.
So clearly people were living there,people were exposed to the same ecological
and environmental circumstances and to thesame patterns of the rise and set of stars
and the sun and the moon and the planetsas seen from that particular geographical
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setting.
So yeah.
We call it the Inca calendar, but it wasno doubt a very long -standing calendar
devised in that part of the Andes beforethe Incas.
Right.
And so with the calendars, for those whodon't know too much about ancient
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calendars, but it's essentially it'sstars, planets, winds, animals, plants,
and they're oftentimes mythologized.
And you see that in artistry or in potteryas well as documents or stone left behind.
But
The big thing would be a lot of thesearchaeological sites that are around this
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area.
And it seems to be that the Incans wereable to scale their society and culture
because they were tracking so well ofthese things.
And so in your field work, you talk a lotabout the kind of...
It's like the mapping of the stars to thelandscaper finding a reference point.
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And tell us about that part of the work.
Well, that part of the work, seeing therelationship between the land and the sky,
came through the field work that I wasdoing in Mismanai.
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And so the way I actually did my fieldwork was, as I mentioned, I often would
work in the field with men during the daydoing different agricultural tasks.
I sort of...
Decided from the beginning of being therethat it was either sit in my hut and just
wait for somebody to come talk to me or Goout and work with him.
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So every day I would do agricultural workin the fields with the people and then or
with them in and then I would get chitchatting with people and if I found
someone who was Who was very interestingand very talkative and then I would ask
them if?
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they were in, if they were willing to cometalk to me about astronomy, about the
stars.
And so they would, they would come to myhouse and then my house was in the middle
of this very small village.
Mishmanai just had probably about 40 or 50houses at the time, probably two or 300
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people.
And, but it was set in a valley surroundedby hills.
And as soon as people started talkingabout the stars and the sun and moon, they
always used the landscape, the mountains,as a signpost for indicating queers
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celestial phenomena, where they rose orwhere they set.
And so it was a system of astronomy thatintegrated
the features of the landscape with whatthey saw in the sky and what they chose to
focus on in the sky.
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So I mean, there are however many zillionsof stars.
And so any given society has to make itsdecision about what it will focus on.
And usually what you focus on is what'srelevant to you in terms of the particular
issues that you have of keeping track.
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time.
So if you have a, if you're in anenvironment where it's critical that you
say plant or harvest at certain times,then you observe the world around you and
you observe right birds, you observeplants, you observe whatever's there, but
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also you observe what stars are risingwhen it's time for you to plant or
harvest.
and what stars are setting.
And then, but not just, but then those arerising and setting behind named mountains,
named places, places that are part of thelocal lore of the landscape.
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And they have names and often they're justto identify what they look like, but
sometimes they're also
linked to time periods.
They may be linked to deities as well.
And so, yeah, I mean, it was always fromthe very beginning, there was always this
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sense that there was this intimateconnection between the landscape, the land
and the sky.
And this is why, I mean, in the end, thebook that I wrote is my doctoral
dissertation.
I named at the crossroads of the earth andthe sky.
People have often told me there are toomany V's in that title.
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But I wanted to indicate that one of thecritical features of their cosmology was
their organization of the space of thevillage inside the village.
And it was organized on the sort offramework of two intersecting footpaths.
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that made a cross in the middle of thevillage.
So a great cross that crossed right wherethere was a small chapel in the middle of
the village.
And so that was one crossroads and thatwas the earthly crossroads.
But then if you've read my book, you knowthat one other critical fundamental
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crossroads in their cosmology was thecrossing of the Milky Way in the sky above
them.
So.
In the Southern Hemisphere, one has aremarkably clear view of the Milky Way,
but seen from the Southern Hemisphere, theMilky Way is much brighter, much more
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apparent, much more dramatic than whenseen from the Northern Hemisphere.
And it has, over the course of time, overthe days, the weeks, the months, the
years,
It has two major axes through the sky.
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So one goes from the northeast to thesouthwest, one goes from the northwest to
the southeast.
And those replace each other every 12hours.
You won't always see those crossing in thezenith, but when they do cross in the
zenith, there's a great cross overhead.
So in Mishmanai, they...
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they talked about, they metaphorized, theymade a connection, a link, an analogy
between the cross in the sky and the MilkyWay and the cross in the village.
And so that was why my book I call At theCrossroads of the Earth and of the Sky,
because there were two crossroads.
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Right.
Sorry for that long, sorry for that longexplanation of the title.
No, that's fantastic.
I mean, it's kind of hard to do itjustice.
I mean, even, you know, it's such a shamethat I'm so bad at geometry and just
spatial things.
But I have to hand it, did you hand drawall your own little Cosmo things that in
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the book and the earth and the axes andthe spheres and all those types of things?
Several of those drawings were done by anartist who was a good friend of mine in
Cusco at the time.
His name was Don Wilson.
He was just an artist who lived in Cuscoand enjoyed the culture in the society of
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Cusco.
But he was an obsessive fellow.
And I made some sketches of what Iunderstood of things about the cosmology
and took them to him and he...
became just obsessed with drawing them.
And he drew them in incredible, fabulousdetail.
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Yeah, so I'm very much indebted to him.
And so he actually created some of themajor drawings in that book about the
cosmology.
And then subsequently, I had the goodfortune of
having a girlfriend who became my wife,who was an artist and who drew a lot of
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the other drawings that were included inthe book as well.
So she was my wife then, she's still mywife now.
So yeah, so she's illustrated a lot of mywork and much of the, or many of the
illustrations in that book were her work.
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Her name's Julia Meyerson, yeah.
wonderful illustrations and yeah, I stillhave to go back to wrap my head because
every night I'm going out on the roof.
I have a very 360 view where I'm atcompared to some of the other spots where
people live up against the mountain andjust trying to, just playing with it of
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looking out every night.
seeing which stars are rising first, whodo I see first, and just putting things
together.
And then I read your book and I'm like,man, I got a long ways to go.
The sophistication is extraordinary.
Well, I will also say that one thing thatI did that really helped me see it in the
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sky was to, in Cuzco, I had the goodfortune as I was writing up my field notes
of finding a celestial globe in a store inCuzco.
And if you have a chance to do that, Ihighly recommend it because with a
celestial globe,
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It's as though you're God looking down onthe universe and all of the stars and the
constellations are there in the globe.
And so you can...
And it's time coordinated, so to showwhere the sun is as it's moving through
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the stars at different times of the year.
So if you get a celestial globe...
It will, I think it will help you identifyand actually look for what you might need
to look for in order to follow thedescription of the cosmology that I give
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in the book.
Right, okay, great idea.
That's on my shopping list now for sure.
You know, speaking of Cusco and just thisidea of mapping the stars to the physical
geography of the Earth, I believe there'ssome people who've done quite a bit of
work on that as well.
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Are you familiar with that, with likeCusco originally being pretty much a
replication of...
constellations or stars or whatever theywere working with and that they brought it
down to the earth kind of similar to whatit seems other cultures have done in other
places in the world.
I'm not actually familiar with that.
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I mean, there was not a sort of school ofthought when I was in Cusco in the 70s and
80s that focused on that, that arguedthat.
Like there's a longstanding tradition thatcame from the Spanish Chronicles that
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Cusco was made in the shape of a puma.
And...
If you look at the outline of the core ofthe city of Cusco, you can sort of imagine
a puma there.
And there's controversy about that aswell, whether they were talking about a
puma in terms of the shape of a puma or apuma in metaphorical terms, that the puma
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as the most revered of wild animals in theAndes that...
there was a connection, a metaphoricalconnection made to Cuzco as the seat of
the Inca empire.
So, but no, to answer your questiondirectly, I'm not aware of arguments that
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have been made, that maybe are being madenow, about how constellations in the sky
were projected down to earth or were theirlikeness was seen somewhere on earth.
No.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, I think that's probably like 80s or90s anthropological stuff that I was
reading.
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So maybe it's coming out later.
But there's, yeah, I mean, I think there'ssome people that are talking about they're
showing like some, you know, ancient Mayancities that are mapped to like the
Pleiades and things like that, or parts ofMexico that seem to be mapped in that way.
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But it's very curious to think about howthey would bring that down and how much
sense it makes to bring that calendar ontothe earth and that they're always
together, right?
There's no, I think a lot of times in themodern world, we kind of separate the
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earth and the sky, but there was noseparation previously.
Right.
And well, for the Andes, I mean, theversion of that that I would say was very
deeply ingrained in Inca culture and stilltoday is what I suggested about how they
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focused very strongly on the Milky Way.
See, this is something that distinguishesthe astronomy of the Incas from the
astronomy of the Mayas and the Aztecs isthat
They were located far north of theequator, so they could see some of the far
southern stars, but they also had theadvantage of a north star.
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So they were in the northern hemisphere,so Polaris, the north star, they, like all
the other great civilizations of theancient world, like the Egyptians and the
Mesopotamians and the ancient Chinese,
They all had a fixed star in the sky toorient their view of the celestial sphere.
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Whereas in the southern hemisphere, thereis no Polaris.
There is no star in the south celestialpole.
So you got to sort of make it up.
My point is that the view to the sky isquite different in the Andes from
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every other major ancient civilization.
And so while I am not aware of theirbringing constellations down to the ground
and making likenesses of theconstellations on the ground, I'm not
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aware of that with the Inca.
But I am aware that they clearly saw thisconnection between the Milky Way, the
grand structure of the Milky Way, andstructures on Earth.
Now, to go back to your point, the oneplace in the Andes where it has been
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argued they may have created likenesses ofthe constellation was in the Nazca Lines,
which is on the south coast of Peru.
And I mean, that is a...
There's a great long history of feuds andarguments about whether or not the figures
that were carved into the desert made intothe desert, whether those represented
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constellations.
That's something we don't want to get intobecause that's a rabbit hole you never get
out of.
one seems like a big trap.
I was there when I first moved to Peru.
I came down from Lima on a bus and stoppedin Nazca.
Actually, at that time, my core interestwas the Pukios, or I forget how they
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pronounce it, but I was more interested inthe aqueducts and the agriculture and the
water system.
But of course I got to just kind of be inthe Nazca Line energy and I saw quite a
few of the lines but yeah I went down thatrabbit hole for a couple of months
afterwards and go man this one is amystery that will not be unraveled.
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Right, right.
Well, and the Kukios themselves are a bigissue as well, are a big mystery as well,
because we don't know, we don't absolutelyknow as far as I understand if they were
pre -conquest or because you have inIslamic culture, you have a very complex
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tradition of making subterranean canals.
And it's the only, almost the only othercomparable
tradition of subterranean irrigation thatyou can compare the Nazca Pukios to.
Anyway, we're far away from the calerunnow.
No, I mean, it's, but it's fascinating.
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So with, we were talking about with,
Going back to the Milky Way, I mean helpme understand that a little bit.
So what you're saying is that just ingeneral the entire reference point for
this astronomical system is the Milky Wayversus other cultures that use completely
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different reference points.
I mean what does that lead to in terms ofthe practicality of things for their
culture or...
Great question.
Great question.
Well, first, let's just remember what allthe other Northern Hemisphere ancient
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societies, how they organized their viewto the sky.
It was basically they focused on theecliptic.
And so the ecliptic is the path of the sunand the planets and the moon through the
stars.
And so that's this band.
in the sky, it's not a visible band, it'sjust the path from about 23 and a half
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degrees north of east and south of eastand north of west and south of west.
So that's the band within which the sunand the moon and the planets rotate.
And that's also the band where all themajor
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constellations of the Western Hemisphereare located.
So Aries and Gemini and Cancer and all ofthe constellations are within the
ecliptic.
So that's how they organized their view.
And the key to it, the sort of pinwheel ofthe whole thing was Polaris.
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It all spun around Polaris.
And so, but now,
we travel south of the equator, we losethe view of Polaris, we look up at the sky
and we don't see anything that's fixed.
There's no fixed point like a southernhemisphere Polaris.
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But what we do see, and much moreprominently in the southern hemisphere
than in the northern hemisphere, is thisgreat white band of stars, the Milky Way.
And I mentioned it before, but...
This is just a critical, this is a reallycritical thing to understand about
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Southern Hemisphere astronomy.
Is that when you're on the earth in theSouthern Hemisphere, you see a version of
the Milky Way, let's say, that is notaccessible, that is not visible to people
in the Northern Hemisphere.
That's because of where we are locatedinside the galaxy, the Milky Way, that is,
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and the angle of the tilt of the axis ofrotation of the Earth.
I know we're talking about rabbit holes.
We're getting down a deep rabbit holehere.
But it's the, we are in the SouthernHemisphere.
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You're looking at the center of thegalaxy.
at the stars in the center of the galaxy.
In the northern hemisphere, you're lookingout at the distant arms of the spiral
galaxy, so you're not looking at thecenter.
So in the southern hemisphere, you seethese very bright stars around the
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Southern Cross, around Alpha and BetaCentauri, all those very bright stars
which you do not see in the northernhemisphere.
Remember,
The sailors in the age of discovery, thebig deal was to see the Southern Cross
finally because they had never seen theSouthern Cross.
It heard of the Southern Cross.
Travelers who'd gone to Africa had seenit.
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But in Europe, you don't see the SouthernCross or Alpha and Babus and Tauri, those
very bright stars in the center of thegalaxy, which you see from the Southern
Hemisphere.
So to go back to your original question,so...
Whereas the Europeans and the ancientChinese all focused on the ecliptic in the
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southern hemisphere, the Incas and otherpeoples focused on what was the visual
phenomenon in the sky that was mostnotable, which was the Milky Way.
And there I have always argued that untilthe time of the modern era, so,
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At the time, the Europeans discovered theIncas.
The astronomy of the Incas was morecomplex than the astronomy of Northern
Europe.
And you have to remember that Copernicusdidn't complete and publish the
(35:23):
preliminary version of his
heliocentric theory until 1531.
The Spaniards conquered Peru in 1532.
So up until that time, the pre -Copernicanastronomy of the Europeans was, I would
argue, not as complex in terms of itsunderstanding of celestial motions as Inca
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cosmology was.
And that's because the Incas coupled
their knowledge of the Milky Way withtheir knowledge of the ecliptic.
So they, like the Europeans, recognizedthe ecliptic, the line of the movement
through the stars of the sun, the moon,and the planets.
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The Inca recognized that as well, but inaddition, they recognized another major
celestial feature, which was the MilkyWay.
So they had these two bands in the sky andthey worked with that.
So it was quite complex.
And then to get to what I know is one ofyour interests, the calendar.
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The calendar then was the sort ofsummation of the recognition of different
cycles, excuse me, different cycles of thesun and the moon and the planets and the
stars.
Speed me.
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So in these calendars, it can get quitemessy, right?
Where lunar cycles don't necessarily matchup with other cycles and there's all these
different components going on.
Tell us a little bit about that and justin studying that and kind of what are the
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challenges that you come into when tryingto form a picture.
And I believe even at one point in yourbook,
you made the point that in one reference,they were, it's seemingly okay with it
being what seemed to be like 20 degreesoff to where if anyone else was studying
this, they would assume there's no waythey would allow for it to be this many
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degrees of difference.
That's just one example.
But I mean, what are the types ofchallenges that you encounter when putting
together a calendar like this?
Right, the reference that you give tobeing say 15 or 20 degrees off, that was a
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spatial designation, not a temporal one.
So in the village in Mishman Nye, whenthey were saying where, for instance, a
certain star might rise or set or wherethe sun might rise or set, they would
reference.
a known point in the landscape.
(38:32):
But in many cases, that point was notexactly where the star rose or set or the
sun set.
So there it was fine to do anapproximation because they were not, in
that case, building a calendar for anempire.
If you're building a calendar for anempire, you need much greater precision.
(38:58):
than you need in a small peasant villagelike Nishmanai.
So to go to Kuzco, so you have, I mean,the basic problem of the calendar is that
you watch the sun move over the course ofthe year.
And if you watch it from one solstice tothe other solstice and back to the first
(39:22):
solstice, and you count those days thatyou get around 365 days.
So that's pretty straightforward.
And then you can just work with that tomake a calendar.
And you can put pillars on a hillside, asthe Incas did.
And you can see where the sun rises orsets at different times in its movement,
(39:50):
from one solstice, one extreme, let's sayto the south.
to the other extreme, say to the north.
And so as it passes those pillars, you canjust name those units of time.
But the complicated and interesting thingabout the calendar is that also there's
(40:11):
another celestial body that's moving inconnection with the sun at the same time,
and that's the moon.
And the moon seems to have a periodicityin its phases called the synodic cycle.
There are about 12 of those as the Sun isgoing through its 365 -day cycle.
(40:36):
So the synodic cycle, the cycle of thephases of the Moon, that's every 29 .5
days, and that gives you 354 days.
So that's pretty close to the 365 days ofthe year, but pretty close is not good
enough.
And...
So the challenge of every calendar systemis how do you coordinate that time clock
(41:03):
of the moon, the monthly time clock of themoon with the steady movements through the
course of the year of the sun.
And some civilizations did it one way,some did it another.
But it's usually a way of finding
(41:25):
a way to make up for that 11 daydifference that gradually accumulates over
time between the period of the moon over12 phases and the period of the movement
of the sun over the course of the year.
I know that gets quite complicated andhard to conceive of, but it's just the
(41:50):
challenge of every civilization.
How do you...
How do you control time?
How do you devise a system that gives youthe confidence that you know where you are
in time?
And the most obvious long -term marker ofthat is the sun.
(42:12):
And within that, then, there's the moon.
And so how do you devise a system that canbe
can be understood that can give youmeaningful periodicities of that
combination between the moon and the sun.
(42:33):
We think the Incas did it.
One theory is that the Incas, that theyhad the periods incorporated in a very
complicated, ritualized, highly ritualizedorganization of the Valley of Cusco, which
(42:58):
was in a system called the Secchi system.
And the Secchi system was the system oforganization of
society, politics, rituals, agriculture,everything in the Inca capital of Cusco.
And the Secchi system was a system of 41lines.
(43:22):
These are imaginary lines.
They're directions of orientation.
They're trajectories from the middle ofthe city of Cusco out to the horizon in 41
different directions.
And along those 41 lines, the Incasrecognized between about a dozen or so,
(43:49):
actually between, I think, around eightand 15 sacred places, named sacred places
in the Valley of Cusco.
And there were either.
.
328 or 350 of those, but close to thenumber of days in the lunar year, 354.
(44:13):
So we think that one of the ways theywere, and just to back up a bit, those
sacred places in the valley, differentgroups in the Inca capital were required
to offer sacrifices.
to one or another of those sacred placesevery day of the year.
(44:34):
So one of the ways they marked time was bythe succession of sacrifices made at all
the sacred places in the valley.
And so we think there with that, with thatSecchi system, that was the calendar.
That was the basis of the calendar.
I mean, that was the realization of thecalendar was the Secchi system.
(44:59):
It was.
related to the sun and it was related tothe moon and certain stars also were
important in it.
So the Inca calendar system waswonderfully complex in those terms, in
terms of all the phenomena that it pulledinto it and that it organized.
(45:23):
Right.
And that's, yeah, wow.
And that still doesn't bring in the plantsand the animal part of it too, which is
there.
no, because you have to correlate all thatas well.
And I mean, those would have been othermarkers of time that people would have
been aware of, that they would have been.
(45:45):
And I think the thing to say, to recognizeis that no one of those things is absolute
when it comes to the need to preciselymark time, at least not for agriculture.
Like you need to know generally when frostcomes and when frost goes.
(46:06):
But generally that's not an absolute dayand a fixed day over the course of the
year.
It's a period.
So you look at different things like thisis what they would look at the Pleiades
for instance.
And if the Pleiades were bright and shiny,then that was not a good sign that it was
time to plant.
But if they were dim,
(46:27):
then that meant there was atmosphericmoisture, and so suggesting that there was
rainfall coming, and so a good time.
There are other ways of reading it thatare almost just the opposite of that as
well, but they're looking at relativeperiods of time and looking at, like you
(46:48):
know you plant generally when this birdreturns or that bird sings or this animal
gives birth to its young or...
And so those clearly were understood,noted, recognized by people throughout the
empire.
(47:08):
And we should remember too when we'retalking about the very, very complicated
calendar in Cusco, the capital of theempire, that was just the city, the
capital.
That was the imperial capital and quitecomplex.
But.
then travel a thousand kilometers to thenorth and you're still in the Inca Empire,
but you're very, very far away from Cuscoand there those people had to build their
(47:35):
own local calendar system.
So we think probably there were lots ofsort of local calendar systems that
overall were coordinated by the Incasthemselves.
Yeah.
I mean, it's such a great point.
I mean, that's essentially what I've beenlearning and seeing.
(47:57):
And I mean, even here, it's so fascinatingbecause I've lived in, I started living
originally in Calcutta for about fourmonths.
And then I was in Urubamba, then I was inWaran, and now I'm in Uicho.
And so...
You know, all of these areas are only, youknow, that whole distance that I just
(48:19):
described is a max of like 35 minutes upand down the highway.
But there are so many micro climateswithin that.
And this is actually a reason why a lot ofindigenous peoples today still don't
adopt, you know, modern meteorologicalforecasts because they're too broad and
(48:40):
they're not specific enough to their microclimate.
And so,
As I read the mythology and other thingsas well, you can start to see, okay, I get
it.
Like, this is why this animal would havebeen so important.
But maybe 100 kilometers away, that animalis not as important to these people
because it's not indicating to themsomething about their immediate
(49:03):
environment that's as important as anotherspecies might be.
And that's kind of...
We see that through mythology and storyand song how it manifests.
It's very interesting, but it's a greatpoint that you make that it's approximate
and it's alive, right?
The winds don't just come on May 1stbecause we say, hey, today's Monday, May
(49:28):
1st, and this is the rule of May 1st thatthese winds have to come on this day.
Right, right, no, and it's not alsoabsolute.
You're suggesting it's not absolute, butit is relative.
So that maybe it's this animal givingbirth and that phase of the moon or like
(49:51):
these plants that flower and it's therelationship of all of these things
occurring in time.
that gives you the signal that it's timeto do this or that or the other thing.
Right, right.
So.
and they're always looking at multiplethings.
(50:12):
Yeah, yeah, very true.
And one interesting thing that again, setsthe Inca empire apart from other
civilizations is that they did not inventa system of writing.
So, like with the Mesopotamians, theEgyptians, the Maya, the Mayans and the
(50:34):
Aztecs as well, what they knew, they setout in a script.
They wrote it down.
So when later people came along, theycould decipher those texts and they could
read what those people thought about whatthey were doing, what they said about, for
(50:56):
instance, the great ninth century Greekwork called Works and Days written by
Hesiod, where he writes about the...
the different birds and plants thatindicate different times and how that's
related to agriculture.
So that's wonderful.
But we have that for the Greeks.
(51:17):
We have it for the Mesopotamians, theChinese, the Mayans.
But we don't have it for the Incas.
The Incas did not invent a system ofwriting.
What they did do was that they invented,although probably they inherited it from
that civilization I mentioned earlier, theWari.
They used a system of knotted strings,which is called a kipu.
(51:43):
And the kipu was a system of recordinginformation in knotted strings using a
base 10 system of registering numericaldata.
So we think that what they did, there maybe some of these.
(52:04):
objects, the kippus, that record non-numerical data.
We don't really know that yet, now.
But at least they constructed thousands ofthese objects, these knotted string
devices, and recorded information.
(52:26):
And they recorded information aboutmatters of state.
So like,
census numbers, goods that were stored inthe storehouses, cycles of numbers of
(52:48):
people who were born and died, etc.
And so they recorded a great amount ofinformation.
in a coded system that the Spaniardsrecognized it.
(53:11):
They saw that it was very complex.
They were interested in it, but none ofthe Spaniards learned how to decipher it.
And beginning in the late 19th century,early 20th century, people have really
begun to concentrate, began to focus ontrying to understand.
(53:31):
what we have left in the remainingexamples of these kibus because that's
where they recorded their knowledge ofthemselves in their own terms was in those
knotted string devices.
And it's almost the kippus are interestingbecause they're almost like I mean really
you could say they're a very ancientcomputer system Right.
(53:54):
It's like a like a very ancient numericalcomputer code that was tied into knots and
colors on these strings But I mean you youyou spent quite a bit of time on these
kippus, but it seems like that's another Imean, do you think?
I mean, is there any way to ever findclear understanding of the records of
(54:19):
khipus or is that just a futile pursuit?
No, I would never say that.
I would never say that.
I mean, it certainly is a challenge.
And I don't have a clear sense of how toanswer the question of what were the most
(54:42):
complex forms of information recorded inthe Kee -poos.
But I mean, there are a lot of peopleworking on it.
There's a lot of research being done, alot of
computerizing of the very careful study ofthe 1 ,000, 1 ,050, or 100 or so examples
(55:07):
that exist today.
There's a lot of information in those.
They've all been, most of them that arenot too fragile to be studied have been
studied now.
And there's a lot of computer analysisgoing on.
I think that, I mean, then we've gottensome pretty good, clear understanding now
(55:35):
of the numerical records, of how they weregoing about recording, like, census data,
how they were recording data pertainingto, like, the storage of agricultural
produce and...
the number of workers who were working onstate projects and a lot of stuff that has
(56:00):
a numerical value, a numerical signature,let's say.
And that's many things in the world.
That information's all there.
And I think we will eventually be able toidentify a wide range of the
(56:23):
numerical notation patterns that will helpus reconstruct some of the core principles
of the Inca empire.
Whether we will ever be able to read onesthat, let's say, contain stories about the
history of the origin of the Incas and howthe Incas themselves told that in their
(56:45):
coding of knots and colors and numbers.
I'm hopeful, but I don't...
I don't see that happening in the nearterm.
Right.
Is there any current, are there any kippusin existence that are clearly linked to
celestial objects or constellations or anyof the astronomy and things that we've
(57:10):
been talking about?
Great question.
We have only two khipus that I'm aware ofthat we can say pretty unambiguously
record calendrical data.
And though one is from the far north ofPeru in Chachapoyas, one is from the south
(57:32):
coast of Peru.
But.
I think what's important here is torecognize that there was an
extraordinarily large number of numericalvalues that were recorded and that are now
(58:01):
represented in the surviving keepers.
So hundreds of thousands of numericalvalues.
and they're just sitting there, they're onstrings, they're on knotted strings.
And for the most part, we would have tosay we don't really know what they refer
to, you know, unless there is somepattern, like a repeated pattern of
(58:25):
numbers, we can recognize that.
We also have some cases where groups ofvalues on a set of strings,
are tied to another string like a parentstring that contains the sum of the value
on that group of strings.
(58:45):
So we have some cases like that.
And we have also we here we have to notethat when the Spaniards came into Peru
following 1532, they
they were, they very quickly conquered theIncas and they became very interested in
(59:14):
how the Incas organized their empire.
They recognized that if they were toinherit the empire, take it over, conquer
it and use it, you know, it was too vastto just like kill off all the Incas and
then, you know, repopulate the land.
So they had to learn how the Incas had
(59:35):
organize this territory.
So they actually began systematicallycalling in khipu keepers, the bureaucratic
officials of the empire who kept thekhipus, and had them read the khipus to
them.
And then they would read it in theirindigenous language and a translator would
translate it into Spanish and a scribewould write down a version of what was
(01:00:03):
recorded on the khipu.
Wow.
That's what we have now.
We have several hundred of thosetranscribed keepers.
And for the most part, we know theypertain to economic records, to
bureaucratic records, numbers of workers,amount of labor that was given, the number
(01:00:29):
of resources that were collected.
And then here you get
like the Incas continued to recordinformation on the Quipus after the
Spanish conquest.
And so you begin to get a mix of recordsof pre -Inca times with colonial times.
So things get quite complicated at thispoint.
(01:00:50):
But to answer your question, like I thinkthat in those transcribed Quipus, we have
our best possible source.
for actually translating some of the morenarrative types of information recorded in
(01:01:11):
the Kipus.
Gosh, what a just extraordinary, you know,I think a lot of times we just assume with
history, it's so much cleaner and easier.
And as soon as you begin to get into anyof this, you realize like, I mean, if
you're not, you know, you need, you need abunch of linguists who are arguing over
(01:01:34):
what, you know, catch a word was, youknow,
translated into Spanish and you needsomeone who's looking at the mythology
aspect, you need someone who's looking atthe calendar and the stars and the
society.
I mean it just gets so, so complex soquickly to try and understand any of this
stuff.
(01:01:55):
Right, that's true.
And it's why it's not a task for anindividual, but it's a task for a
community of people working together tomake advances.
So I'm going to have to move on prettyquick.
(01:02:17):
Yeah.
no worries.
Well, we could go on forever, so we couldactually, we could call it here for today,
but I'm gonna have to have you on again,Gary, because we got a lot more to go
through.
Okay, I'll be happy to talk to you,Justin.
I enjoyed the conversation.
Thank you for the very good questions.
(01:02:40):
And yeah, so let's stay in touch.
I'd be happy to do more.
Yeah, for sure.
And I'm going to be, and I'm working onsome kind of citizen science projects down
here.
So I'm actually, hopefully going to go forthe Pleiades viewing in June for the
weather forecasting for the coming months.
But I'll stay in touch.
I'm going to be shipping you questionshere and there that I have that hopefully
(01:03:02):
you can give me perspective on as well.
And I just, I'd love to, to keep it goingand I'll let you know all the things that,
you know, I found a,
Well, it was professor just though whoactually just really quickly to give you a
reference point There's a there's aprofessor here.
He's probably in his Who still must be inhis 80s, maybe even his 90s, but the dude
(01:03:26):
books it up the mountain faster than I canand he
He was a biologist at the university, butthen he retired and he's more of like an
herbalist now.
And he takes people up into the mountainsand shows them all the different medicinal
plants and things like that.
(01:03:46):
And I went on this walk with him and Istarted asking him kind of these calendar
questions and he just lit up and got veryexcited.
yeah, he just said, you know, if you hearthe fox at this time, but it's,
If it makes a sound that's more, you know,chattery, that's different than if it
(01:04:07):
makes a sound, if it's, you know, clearand consistent about the weather.
And if the ducks are putting their eggsnear the river, you know, that means this
or this and that.
And he goes, you know, and then he goes,well, you know, there's, there's books on
these things.
And he goes, he goes, he goes, Gary, GaryErton, you know, he, and he doesn't speak
any English.
He only speaks Spanish and Ketchum.
(01:04:28):
He goes, Gary Erton.
And so I took down your name that day andI came home and I opened up my Google Docs
of all these people that I want tointerview.
And sure enough, your name was already inthere from about eight months ago.
I had come across your work about eightmonths ago.
And then Professor Husto mentioned youagain.
And so that's when I definitely had toreach out.
(01:04:50):
I'm so honored to hear that a fellow likethat would reference me.
That's very heartwarming.
Thank you, Justin, for that.
love to meet him.
He actually just recently found a new siteoutside Cusco that he's been working to
protect and he's actually fighting withthe government and he's working with the
(01:05:11):
local community because the government waskind of trying to just exploit it for
tourism immediately and he's trying tokeep it a little protected for some time.
Yeah, but yep.
Okay, take care.
I'll see you.
we'll keep talking.
Okay, bye -bye.
Not sure how to get out.
Alright, good morning Gary, or goodafternoon, how are you today?
I'm doing fine, thank you, how are you?
I'm doing well.
Like we were talking about just a littlePeruvian hiccups this morning with water
faucets and construction, but we're doingwell.
So, yep, I'm in the Sacred Valley.
(00:21):
So I'm in Huitxo.
And I think this is probably, I'm not toofar from where you were around here in the
70s.
I was just in...
I was in Lamai on Sunday for a wedding.
And so, you know, you reference Lamaiquite a bit in your book.
(00:45):
But...
on the hill up above the valley, so nearMaras.
And the village where I lived wasMishmanai, which is near the great
sinkholes of Morai.
Okay, right.
And is that near is that near Chinchero?
(01:07):
It's across the plain from Chinchero.
So when you look out from the villagewhere I was, Mishmanay, Chinchero is in
the distance and then beyond that you seethe hills above Cusco.
Right.
So it's all, yeah, it's within line ofsight of Chinchero.
(01:30):
And then in the other direction is thegreat Salinas that overlook the Sacred
Valley.
near Ollantaytambo.
huh, okay.
I still haven't made it up to Antitomboyet, but that's on my list in the next
month or so.
There's a very interesting family.
I wonder if they would have been here.
(01:53):
it's a shame.
I can't remember the guy's name, but hewas kind of an explorer, wrote a couple of
books on Andean mythology.
Randall, yes.
So I know his son here.
do you really?
Yeah, his son is here.
The family has the...
They still have the hotel and thedistillery.
(02:14):
The distillery is quite famous now.
They've won quite a few awards fordifferent medicinal plant kind of alcohols
that they distill up there.
But yeah, I was...
It's just unreal.
I was...
just digging through, you know, Andeanmythology.
And I come across this guy, Randall.
(02:36):
I'm like, wow, this guy's pretty rad, youknow?
And I'm starting to do some research, andthen I find his wife.
And then it's, they're talking about howthese, this family started this hotel.
And I'm like, that sounds kind offamiliar.
they have a distillery.
wait a second, I know that guy.
And so I know one of the sons who'sactually a quite renowned artist in Lima
(02:57):
nowadays.
his work and I've corresponded with him.
And I mean, I don't think I've everactually met him.
The two boys were born, like they werejust babies when I was there.
But Randall, that's an interesting story.
He was an adventurer and an explorer andhe was quite knowledgeable about Andean
(03:22):
matters.
And I don't know if you're aware, but heactually died.
He was bitten by his dog, a rabbit, whowas rabbit.
It was his own dog.
Right.
Yeah.
And so that was in the probably the end ofthe seventies, early eighties, something
like that.
And then his wife stayed on there with theboys and, and continued to run the hotel.
(03:48):
So, but they were quite.
the notable people around there in thoseyears and were quite famous.
They would come to Cuzco all in as a clanand were really interesting people.
Right.
I mean, as soon as I found out about them,I was like, because I met the son at a
separate kind of like barbecue, you know,four or five months ago, and it was just
(04:10):
clear like, man, this guy's got somejuice, you know what I mean?
Like that family's holding something quiteinteresting.
yeah.
Is the mother still there?
I believe she's in Lima.
I haven't met her before.
I believe she's in Lima for the most partand then the one son stays up there full
time.
They have the hotel, like a full organicrestaurant.
(04:33):
They have their own little organic farmthat supplies the restaurant and the
distillery going on up there.
But I did not know that he was bitten byit.
Because I believe what it said when I readthat he passed away young was that it was
from a tropical disease.
He was in my memory.
He was bitten by a rabid dog.
(04:55):
And I believe it was his dog.
It was the most surprising and tragicstory.
Yeah.
I mean, I could be wrong.
Ask his son.
He will surely know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a little sensitive, I wouldthink.
the thing is though is that being bittenby your own rabid dog in Peru would be a
(05:19):
highly likely scenario given that most ofus take in half street dogs, half home
dogs, and you never know what's going on.
So it's a very plausible situation tohappen here, no doubt about it.
possible scenario, right, right.
sure.
Well, so, I mean, I came to your workthrough all this study that I'm doing on
(05:41):
particularly weather forecasting,astronomy, animals, plants, things like
that.
And so you were here starting in, whatyear did you come to Peru to do field
work?
Well, I came first in 1973.
(06:06):
I came with Tom Zydema, who was a Dutchethno - historian who studied the Inca,
who was very interested in Inca history,Inca calendars, Inca ritualism.
You'll have to excuse the...
no worries.
(06:26):
the siren outside.
I'm in downtown Warsaw and there arecontinual sirens going by outside.
So I went first in 1971 and then I wentagain.
(06:47):
That was just for some summer research.
Then I went again in 1973, stayed mostlyin Cusco.
And then it was not until 1975 that Iactually went to the small community of
Mismanai above the archaeological site ofMorai.
(07:08):
And I had done some research in Morai.
I was working there with an anthropologistnamed John Earls, a very famous fellow who
did work in...
looking at sort of Inka environmentalknowledge and how they constructed
(07:32):
archaeological sites for agriculturalpurposes.
And he was interested in Marai thinking itwas an agricultural experimental station.
So we camped out there several months andthe village of Mishmanai was just above
and the women and children would come downand pastoring their cattle.
(07:54):
down into the side of Moriah and we got toknow them.
So I got a grant from the Organization ofAmerican States in 1975 to do my field
work.
And so the only village that I really knewwas the village of Moriah.
So I just went straight there and asked ifI could have a room, if I could rent a
room.
And so the rest is, yeah, the long storyof then staying in the village, living
(08:21):
there and...
working with the men in the village and asoften as I could, urging and encouraging
people to talk to me about the stars.
I was interested in astronomy, inastronomy and the calendar.
And just to back up a little bit, Imentioned that I worked with Tom Zaitema
(08:45):
and that he was interested in the Incas,but he especially was
in those years in the mid 1970s interestedin reconstructing the Inca calendar system
to see if on the basis of the informationrecorded in the Spanish Chronicles if we
could reconstruct what must have been avery complex calendar system of the Incas.
(09:12):
And so I worked with him and thendetermined when I started doing my field
work that well we didn't really know.
much at all about what people in thecountryside, the Quechua -speaking people
in villages around Cusco, what they saidabout the stars and the sun and the moon
(09:33):
and the planets.
And so when I got my grant to do fieldwork, I decided that I would carry out a
study in the village and learn as much asI could.
about their astronomy, their cosmology,etc.
Okay, fascinating.
And so with the calendar work, theastronomy being a large missing piece,
(10:00):
were there other pieces that were moreintact of the calendar that you guys came
to?
And then really quickly, just to clarify,I mean, would this be kind of a mishmash
of really, we would call it an Incancalendar for the sake of easy reference
point, but is it also likely that
(10:20):
a lot of the calendar is pre -Incan andlike a deep Quechua pre -Incan calendar
that would be really what you would find.
That's an excellent question.
I mean, it's a question that we don'treally know the answer to, but we presume
that the Incas didn't invent theircalendar whole cloth from nothing.
(10:42):
I mean, they were living in a place wherepeople had been living for literally a few
thousand years and agriculture waspracticed in that region from very early
times.
Camelot herding.
Herdinghamas and Alpacas was also a partof the economy.
(11:04):
And so going back to much earlier times,Wari times, for instance, the Wari, a very
famous pre -Inca empire from about 600 ADto 1000 AD, they had settlements, sites in
what would become the region of thecapital city of
(11:27):
Cusco, the capital of the Inca Empire, theWari had occupied that area and then even
people before the Wari.
So clearly people were living there,people were exposed to the same ecological
and environmental circumstances and to thesame patterns of the rise and set of stars
and the sun and the moon and the planetsas seen from that particular geographical
(11:54):
setting.
So yeah.
We call it the Inca calendar, but it wasno doubt a very long -standing calendar
devised in that part of the Andes beforethe Incas.
Right.
And so with the calendars, for those whodon't know too much about ancient
(12:16):
calendars, but it's essentially it'sstars, planets, winds, animals, plants,
and they're oftentimes mythologized.
And you see that in artistry or in potteryas well as documents or stone left behind.
But
The big thing would be a lot of thesearchaeological sites that are around this
(12:39):
area.
And it seems to be that the Incans wereable to scale their society and culture
because they were tracking so well ofthese things.
And so in your field work, you talk a lotabout the kind of...
It's like the mapping of the stars to thelandscaper finding a reference point.
(13:05):
And tell us about that part of the work.
Well, that part of the work, seeing therelationship between the land and the sky,
came through the field work that I wasdoing in Mismanai.
(13:26):
And so the way I actually did my fieldwork was, as I mentioned, I often would
work in the field with men during the daydoing different agricultural tasks.
I sort of...
Decided from the beginning of being therethat it was either sit in my hut and just
wait for somebody to come talk to me or Goout and work with him.
(13:47):
So every day I would do agricultural workin the fields with the people and then or
with them in and then I would get chitchatting with people and if I found
someone who was Who was very interestingand very talkative and then I would ask
them if?
(14:08):
they were in, if they were willing to cometalk to me about astronomy, about the
stars.
And so they would, they would come to myhouse and then my house was in the middle
of this very small village.
Mishmanai just had probably about 40 or 50houses at the time, probably two or 300
(14:28):
people.
And, but it was set in a valley surroundedby hills.
And as soon as people started talkingabout the stars and the sun and moon, they
always used the landscape, the mountains,as a signpost for indicating queers
(14:52):
celestial phenomena, where they rose orwhere they set.
And so it was a system of astronomy thatintegrated
the features of the landscape with whatthey saw in the sky and what they chose to
focus on in the sky.
(15:13):
So I mean, there are however many zillionsof stars.
And so any given society has to make itsdecision about what it will focus on.
And usually what you focus on is what'srelevant to you in terms of the particular
issues that you have of keeping track.
(15:33):
time.
So if you have a, if you're in anenvironment where it's critical that you
say plant or harvest at certain times,then you observe the world around you and
you observe right birds, you observeplants, you observe whatever's there, but
(15:56):
also you observe what stars are risingwhen it's time for you to plant or
harvest.
and what stars are setting.
And then, but not just, but then those arerising and setting behind named mountains,
named places, places that are part of thelocal lore of the landscape.
(16:25):
And they have names and often they're justto identify what they look like, but
sometimes they're also
linked to time periods.
They may be linked to deities as well.
And so, yeah, I mean, it was always fromthe very beginning, there was always this
(16:46):
sense that there was this intimateconnection between the landscape, the land
and the sky.
And this is why, I mean, in the end, thebook that I wrote is my doctoral
dissertation.
I named at the crossroads of the earth andthe sky.
People have often told me there are toomany V's in that title.
(17:09):
But I wanted to indicate that one of thecritical features of their cosmology was
their organization of the space of thevillage inside the village.
And it was organized on the sort offramework of two intersecting footpaths.
(17:29):
that made a cross in the middle of thevillage.
So a great cross that crossed right wherethere was a small chapel in the middle of
the village.
And so that was one crossroads and thatwas the earthly crossroads.
But then if you've read my book, you knowthat one other critical fundamental
(17:52):
crossroads in their cosmology was thecrossing of the Milky Way in the sky above
them.
So.
In the Southern Hemisphere, one has aremarkably clear view of the Milky Way,
but seen from the Southern Hemisphere, theMilky Way is much brighter, much more
(18:14):
apparent, much more dramatic than whenseen from the Northern Hemisphere.
And it has, over the course of time, overthe days, the weeks, the months, the
years,
It has two major axes through the sky.
(18:34):
So one goes from the northeast to thesouthwest, one goes from the northwest to
the southeast.
And those replace each other every 12hours.
You won't always see those crossing in thezenith, but when they do cross in the
zenith, there's a great cross overhead.
So in Mishmanai, they...
(18:54):
they talked about, they metaphorized, theymade a connection, a link, an analogy
between the cross in the sky and the MilkyWay and the cross in the village.
And so that was why my book I call At theCrossroads of the Earth and of the Sky,
because there were two crossroads.
(19:15):
Right.
Sorry for that long, sorry for that longexplanation of the title.
No, that's fantastic.
I mean, it's kind of hard to do itjustice.
I mean, even, you know, it's such a shamethat I'm so bad at geometry and just
spatial things.
But I have to hand it, did you hand drawall your own little Cosmo things that in
(19:40):
the book and the earth and the axes andthe spheres and all those types of things?
Several of those drawings were done by anartist who was a good friend of mine in
Cusco at the time.
His name was Don Wilson.
He was just an artist who lived in Cuscoand enjoyed the culture in the society of
(20:02):
Cusco.
But he was an obsessive fellow.
And I made some sketches of what Iunderstood of things about the cosmology
and took them to him and he...
became just obsessed with drawing them.
And he drew them in incredible, fabulousdetail.
(20:25):
Yeah, so I'm very much indebted to him.
And so he actually created some of themajor drawings in that book about the
cosmology.
And then subsequently, I had the goodfortune of
having a girlfriend who became my wife,who was an artist and who drew a lot of
(20:49):
the other drawings that were included inthe book as well.
So she was my wife then, she's still mywife now.
So yeah, so she's illustrated a lot of mywork and much of the, or many of the
illustrations in that book were her work.
(21:09):
Her name's Julia Meyerson, yeah.
wonderful illustrations and yeah, I stillhave to go back to wrap my head because
every night I'm going out on the roof.
I have a very 360 view where I'm atcompared to some of the other spots where
people live up against the mountain andjust trying to, just playing with it of
(21:35):
looking out every night.
seeing which stars are rising first, whodo I see first, and just putting things
together.
And then I read your book and I'm like,man, I got a long ways to go.
The sophistication is extraordinary.
Well, I will also say that one thing thatI did that really helped me see it in the
(22:00):
sky was to, in Cuzco, I had the goodfortune as I was writing up my field notes
of finding a celestial globe in a store inCuzco.
And if you have a chance to do that, Ihighly recommend it because with a
celestial globe,
(22:21):
It's as though you're God looking down onthe universe and all of the stars and the
constellations are there in the globe.
And so you can...
And it's time coordinated, so to showwhere the sun is as it's moving through
(22:43):
the stars at different times of the year.
So if you get a celestial globe...
It will, I think it will help you identifyand actually look for what you might need
to look for in order to follow thedescription of the cosmology that I give
(23:07):
in the book.
Right, okay, great idea.
That's on my shopping list now for sure.
You know, speaking of Cusco and just thisidea of mapping the stars to the physical
geography of the Earth, I believe there'ssome people who've done quite a bit of
work on that as well.
(23:27):
Are you familiar with that, with likeCusco originally being pretty much a
replication of...
constellations or stars or whatever theywere working with and that they brought it
down to the earth kind of similar to whatit seems other cultures have done in other
places in the world.
I'm not actually familiar with that.
(23:49):
I mean, there was not a sort of school ofthought when I was in Cusco in the 70s and
80s that focused on that, that arguedthat.
Like there's a longstanding tradition thatcame from the Spanish Chronicles that
(24:11):
Cusco was made in the shape of a puma.
And...
If you look at the outline of the core ofthe city of Cusco, you can sort of imagine
a puma there.
And there's controversy about that aswell, whether they were talking about a
puma in terms of the shape of a puma or apuma in metaphorical terms, that the puma
(24:35):
as the most revered of wild animals in theAndes that...
there was a connection, a metaphoricalconnection made to Cuzco as the seat of
the Inca empire.
So, but no, to answer your questiondirectly, I'm not aware of arguments that
(24:58):
have been made, that maybe are being madenow, about how constellations in the sky
were projected down to earth or were theirlikeness was seen somewhere on earth.
No.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, I think that's probably like 80s or90s anthropological stuff that I was
reading.
(25:19):
So maybe it's coming out later.
But there's, yeah, I mean, I think there'ssome people that are talking about they're
showing like some, you know, ancient Mayancities that are mapped to like the
Pleiades and things like that, or parts ofMexico that seem to be mapped in that way.
(25:39):
But it's very curious to think about howthey would bring that down and how much
sense it makes to bring that calendar ontothe earth and that they're always
together, right?
There's no, I think a lot of times in themodern world, we kind of separate the
(26:00):
earth and the sky, but there was noseparation previously.
Right.
And well, for the Andes, I mean, theversion of that that I would say was very
deeply ingrained in Inca culture and stilltoday is what I suggested about how they
(26:21):
focused very strongly on the Milky Way.
See, this is something that distinguishesthe astronomy of the Incas from the
astronomy of the Mayas and the Aztecs isthat
They were located far north of theequator, so they could see some of the far
southern stars, but they also had theadvantage of a north star.
(26:46):
So they were in the northern hemisphere,so Polaris, the north star, they, like all
the other great civilizations of theancient world, like the Egyptians and the
Mesopotamians and the ancient Chinese,
They all had a fixed star in the sky toorient their view of the celestial sphere.
(27:11):
Whereas in the southern hemisphere, thereis no Polaris.
There is no star in the south celestialpole.
So you got to sort of make it up.
My point is that the view to the sky isquite different in the Andes from
(27:32):
every other major ancient civilization.
And so while I am not aware of theirbringing constellations down to the ground
and making likenesses of theconstellations on the ground, I'm not
(27:56):
aware of that with the Inca.
But I am aware that they clearly saw thisconnection between the Milky Way, the
grand structure of the Milky Way, andstructures on Earth.
Now, to go back to your point, the oneplace in the Andes where it has been
(28:16):
argued they may have created likenesses ofthe constellation was in the Nazca Lines,
which is on the south coast of Peru.
And I mean, that is a...
There's a great long history of feuds andarguments about whether or not the figures
that were carved into the desert made intothe desert, whether those represented
(28:40):
constellations.
That's something we don't want to get intobecause that's a rabbit hole you never get
out of.
one seems like a big trap.
I was there when I first moved to Peru.
I came down from Lima on a bus and stoppedin Nazca.
Actually, at that time, my core interestwas the Pukios, or I forget how they
(29:04):
pronounce it, but I was more interested inthe aqueducts and the agriculture and the
water system.
But of course I got to just kind of be inthe Nazca Line energy and I saw quite a
few of the lines but yeah I went down thatrabbit hole for a couple of months
afterwards and go man this one is amystery that will not be unraveled.
(29:26):
Right, right.
Well, and the Kukios themselves are a bigissue as well, are a big mystery as well,
because we don't know, we don't absolutelyknow as far as I understand if they were
pre -conquest or because you have inIslamic culture, you have a very complex
(29:48):
tradition of making subterranean canals.
And it's the only, almost the only othercomparable
tradition of subterranean irrigation thatyou can compare the Nazca Pukios to.
Anyway, we're far away from the calerunnow.
No, I mean, it's, but it's fascinating.
(30:09):
So with, we were talking about with,
Going back to the Milky Way, I mean helpme understand that a little bit.
So what you're saying is that just ingeneral the entire reference point for
this astronomical system is the Milky Wayversus other cultures that use completely
(30:33):
different reference points.
I mean what does that lead to in terms ofthe practicality of things for their
culture or...
Great question.
Great question.
Well, first, let's just remember what allthe other Northern Hemisphere ancient
(30:55):
societies, how they organized their viewto the sky.
It was basically they focused on theecliptic.
And so the ecliptic is the path of the sunand the planets and the moon through the
stars.
And so that's this band.
in the sky, it's not a visible band, it'sjust the path from about 23 and a half
(31:20):
degrees north of east and south of eastand north of west and south of west.
So that's the band within which the sunand the moon and the planets rotate.
And that's also the band where all themajor
(31:42):
constellations of the Western Hemisphereare located.
So Aries and Gemini and Cancer and all ofthe constellations are within the
ecliptic.
So that's how they organized their view.
And the key to it, the sort of pinwheel ofthe whole thing was Polaris.
(32:04):
It all spun around Polaris.
And so, but now,
we travel south of the equator, we losethe view of Polaris, we look up at the sky
and we don't see anything that's fixed.
There's no fixed point like a southernhemisphere Polaris.
(32:24):
But what we do see, and much moreprominently in the southern hemisphere
than in the northern hemisphere, is thisgreat white band of stars, the Milky Way.
And I mentioned it before, but...
This is just a critical, this is a reallycritical thing to understand about
(32:46):
Southern Hemisphere astronomy.
Is that when you're on the earth in theSouthern Hemisphere, you see a version of
the Milky Way, let's say, that is notaccessible, that is not visible to people
in the Northern Hemisphere.
That's because of where we are locatedinside the galaxy, the Milky Way, that is,
(33:11):
and the angle of the tilt of the axis ofrotation of the Earth.
I know we're talking about rabbit holes.
We're getting down a deep rabbit holehere.
But it's the, we are in the SouthernHemisphere.
(33:31):
You're looking at the center of thegalaxy.
at the stars in the center of the galaxy.
In the northern hemisphere, you're lookingout at the distant arms of the spiral
galaxy, so you're not looking at thecenter.
So in the southern hemisphere, you seethese very bright stars around the
(33:53):
Southern Cross, around Alpha and BetaCentauri, all those very bright stars
which you do not see in the northernhemisphere.
Remember,
The sailors in the age of discovery, thebig deal was to see the Southern Cross
finally because they had never seen theSouthern Cross.
It heard of the Southern Cross.
Travelers who'd gone to Africa had seenit.
(34:15):
But in Europe, you don't see the SouthernCross or Alpha and Babus and Tauri, those
very bright stars in the center of thegalaxy, which you see from the Southern
Hemisphere.
So to go back to your original question,so...
Whereas the Europeans and the ancientChinese all focused on the ecliptic in the
(34:36):
southern hemisphere, the Incas and otherpeoples focused on what was the visual
phenomenon in the sky that was mostnotable, which was the Milky Way.
And there I have always argued that untilthe time of the modern era, so,
(34:59):
At the time, the Europeans discovered theIncas.
The astronomy of the Incas was morecomplex than the astronomy of Northern
Europe.
And you have to remember that Copernicusdidn't complete and publish the
(35:23):
preliminary version of his
heliocentric theory until 1531.
The Spaniards conquered Peru in 1532.
So up until that time, the pre -Copernicanastronomy of the Europeans was, I would
argue, not as complex in terms of itsunderstanding of celestial motions as Inca
(35:51):
cosmology was.
And that's because the Incas coupled
their knowledge of the Milky Way withtheir knowledge of the ecliptic.
So they, like the Europeans, recognizedthe ecliptic, the line of the movement
through the stars of the sun, the moon,and the planets.
(36:14):
The Inca recognized that as well, but inaddition, they recognized another major
celestial feature, which was the MilkyWay.
So they had these two bands in the sky andthey worked with that.
So it was quite complex.
And then to get to what I know is one ofyour interests, the calendar.
(36:36):
The calendar then was the sort ofsummation of the recognition of different
cycles, excuse me, different cycles of thesun and the moon and the planets and the
stars.
Speed me.
(37:01):
So in these calendars, it can get quitemessy, right?
Where lunar cycles don't necessarily matchup with other cycles and there's all these
different components going on.
Tell us a little bit about that and justin studying that and kind of what are the
(37:24):
challenges that you come into when tryingto form a picture.
And I believe even at one point in yourbook,
you made the point that in one reference,they were, it's seemingly okay with it
being what seemed to be like 20 degreesoff to where if anyone else was studying
this, they would assume there's no waythey would allow for it to be this many
(37:47):
degrees of difference.
That's just one example.
But I mean, what are the types ofchallenges that you encounter when putting
together a calendar like this?
Right, the reference that you give tobeing say 15 or 20 degrees off, that was a
(38:08):
spatial designation, not a temporal one.
So in the village in Mishman Nye, whenthey were saying where, for instance, a
certain star might rise or set or wherethe sun might rise or set, they would
reference.
a known point in the landscape.
(38:32):
But in many cases, that point was notexactly where the star rose or set or the
sun set.
So there it was fine to do anapproximation because they were not, in
that case, building a calendar for anempire.
If you're building a calendar for anempire, you need much greater precision.
(38:58):
than you need in a small peasant villagelike Nishmanai.
So to go to Kuzco, so you have, I mean,the basic problem of the calendar is that
you watch the sun move over the course ofthe year.
And if you watch it from one solstice tothe other solstice and back to the first
(39:22):
solstice, and you count those days thatyou get around 365 days.
So that's pretty straightforward.
And then you can just work with that tomake a calendar.
And you can put pillars on a hillside, asthe Incas did.
And you can see where the sun rises orsets at different times in its movement,
(39:50):
from one solstice, one extreme, let's sayto the south.
to the other extreme, say to the north.
And so as it passes those pillars, you canjust name those units of time.
But the complicated and interesting thingabout the calendar is that also there's
(40:11):
another celestial body that's moving inconnection with the sun at the same time,
and that's the moon.
And the moon seems to have a periodicityin its phases called the synodic cycle.
There are about 12 of those as the Sun isgoing through its 365 -day cycle.
(40:36):
So the synodic cycle, the cycle of thephases of the Moon, that's every 29 .5
days, and that gives you 354 days.
So that's pretty close to the 365 days ofthe year, but pretty close is not good
enough.
And...
So the challenge of every calendar systemis how do you coordinate that time clock
(41:03):
of the moon, the monthly time clock of themoon with the steady movements through the
course of the year of the sun.
And some civilizations did it one way,some did it another.
But it's usually a way of finding
(41:25):
a way to make up for that 11 daydifference that gradually accumulates over
time between the period of the moon over12 phases and the period of the movement
of the sun over the course of the year.
I know that gets quite complicated andhard to conceive of, but it's just the
(41:50):
challenge of every civilization.
How do you...
How do you control time?
How do you devise a system that gives youthe confidence that you know where you are
in time?
And the most obvious long -term marker ofthat is the sun.
(42:12):
And within that, then, there's the moon.
And so how do you devise a system that canbe
can be understood that can give youmeaningful periodicities of that
combination between the moon and the sun.
(42:33):
We think the Incas did it.
One theory is that the Incas, that theyhad the periods incorporated in a very
complicated, ritualized, highly ritualizedorganization of the Valley of Cusco, which
(42:58):
was in a system called the Secchi system.
And the Secchi system was the system oforganization of
society, politics, rituals, agriculture,everything in the Inca capital of Cusco.
And the Secchi system was a system of 41lines.
(43:22):
These are imaginary lines.
They're directions of orientation.
They're trajectories from the middle ofthe city of Cusco out to the horizon in 41
different directions.
And along those 41 lines, the Incasrecognized between about a dozen or so,
(43:49):
actually between, I think, around eightand 15 sacred places, named sacred places
in the Valley of Cusco.
And there were either.
.
328 or 350 of those, but close to thenumber of days in the lunar year, 354.
(44:13):
So we think that one of the ways theywere, and just to back up a bit, those
sacred places in the valley, differentgroups in the Inca capital were required
to offer sacrifices.
to one or another of those sacred placesevery day of the year.
(44:34):
So one of the ways they marked time was bythe succession of sacrifices made at all
the sacred places in the valley.
And so we think there with that, with thatSecchi system, that was the calendar.
That was the basis of the calendar.
I mean, that was the realization of thecalendar was the Secchi system.
(44:59):
It was.
related to the sun and it was related tothe moon and certain stars also were
important in it.
So the Inca calendar system waswonderfully complex in those terms, in
terms of all the phenomena that it pulledinto it and that it organized.
(45:23):
Right.
And that's, yeah, wow.
And that still doesn't bring in the plantsand the animal part of it too, which is
there.
no, because you have to correlate all thatas well.
And I mean, those would have been othermarkers of time that people would have
been aware of, that they would have been.
(45:45):
And I think the thing to say, to recognizeis that no one of those things is absolute
when it comes to the need to preciselymark time, at least not for agriculture.
Like you need to know generally when frostcomes and when frost goes.
(46:06):
But generally that's not an absolute dayand a fixed day over the course of the
year.
It's a period.
So you look at different things like thisis what they would look at the Pleiades
for instance.
And if the Pleiades were bright and shiny,then that was not a good sign that it was
time to plant.
But if they were dim,
(46:27):
then that meant there was atmosphericmoisture, and so suggesting that there was
rainfall coming, and so a good time.
There are other ways of reading it thatare almost just the opposite of that as
well, but they're looking at relativeperiods of time and looking at, like you
(46:48):
know you plant generally when this birdreturns or that bird sings or this animal
gives birth to its young or...
And so those clearly were understood,noted, recognized by people throughout the
empire.
(47:08):
And we should remember too when we'retalking about the very, very complicated
calendar in Cusco, the capital of theempire, that was just the city, the
capital.
That was the imperial capital and quitecomplex.
But.
then travel a thousand kilometers to thenorth and you're still in the Inca Empire,
but you're very, very far away from Cuscoand there those people had to build their
(47:35):
own local calendar system.
So we think probably there were lots ofsort of local calendar systems that
overall were coordinated by the Incasthemselves.
Yeah.
I mean, it's such a great point.
I mean, that's essentially what I've beenlearning and seeing.
(47:57):
And I mean, even here, it's so fascinatingbecause I've lived in, I started living
originally in Calcutta for about fourmonths.
And then I was in Urubamba, then I was inWaran, and now I'm in Uicho.
And so...
You know, all of these areas are only, youknow, that whole distance that I just
(48:19):
described is a max of like 35 minutes upand down the highway.
But there are so many micro climateswithin that.
And this is actually a reason why a lot ofindigenous peoples today still don't
adopt, you know, modern meteorologicalforecasts because they're too broad and
(48:40):
they're not specific enough to their microclimate.
And so,
As I read the mythology and other thingsas well, you can start to see, okay, I get
it.
Like, this is why this animal would havebeen so important.
But maybe 100 kilometers away, that animalis not as important to these people
because it's not indicating to themsomething about their immediate
(49:03):
environment that's as important as anotherspecies might be.
And that's kind of...
We see that through mythology and storyand song how it manifests.
It's very interesting, but it's a greatpoint that you make that it's approximate
and it's alive, right?
The winds don't just come on May 1stbecause we say, hey, today's Monday, May
(49:28):
1st, and this is the rule of May 1st thatthese winds have to come on this day.
Right, right, no, and it's not alsoabsolute.
You're suggesting it's not absolute, butit is relative.
So that maybe it's this animal givingbirth and that phase of the moon or like
(49:51):
these plants that flower and it's therelationship of all of these things
occurring in time.
that gives you the signal that it's timeto do this or that or the other thing.
Right, right.
So.
and they're always looking at multiplethings.
(50:12):
Yeah, yeah, very true.
And one interesting thing that again, setsthe Inca empire apart from other
civilizations is that they did not inventa system of writing.
So, like with the Mesopotamians, theEgyptians, the Maya, the Mayans and the
(50:34):
Aztecs as well, what they knew, they setout in a script.
They wrote it down.
So when later people came along, theycould decipher those texts and they could
read what those people thought about whatthey were doing, what they said about, for
(50:56):
instance, the great ninth century Greekwork called Works and Days written by
Hesiod, where he writes about the...
the different birds and plants thatindicate different times and how that's
related to agriculture.
So that's wonderful.
But we have that for the Greeks.
(51:17):
We have it for the Mesopotamians, theChinese, the Mayans.
But we don't have it for the Incas.
The Incas did not invent a system ofwriting.
What they did do was that they invented,although probably they inherited it from
that civilization I mentioned earlier, theWari.
They used a system of knotted strings,which is called a kipu.
(51:43):
And the kipu was a system of recordinginformation in knotted strings using a
base 10 system of registering numericaldata.
So we think that what they did, there maybe some of these.
(52:04):
objects, the kippus, that record non-numerical data.
We don't really know that yet, now.
But at least they constructed thousands ofthese objects, these knotted string
devices, and recorded information.
(52:26):
And they recorded information aboutmatters of state.
So like,
census numbers, goods that were stored inthe storehouses, cycles of numbers of
(52:48):
people who were born and died, etc.
And so they recorded a great amount ofinformation.
in a coded system that the Spaniardsrecognized it.
(53:11):
They saw that it was very complex.
They were interested in it, but none ofthe Spaniards learned how to decipher it.
And beginning in the late 19th century,early 20th century, people have really
begun to concentrate, began to focus ontrying to understand.
(53:31):
what we have left in the remainingexamples of these kibus because that's
where they recorded their knowledge ofthemselves in their own terms was in those
knotted string devices.
And it's almost the kippus are interestingbecause they're almost like I mean really
you could say they're a very ancientcomputer system Right.
(53:54):
It's like a like a very ancient numericalcomputer code that was tied into knots and
colors on these strings But I mean you youyou spent quite a bit of time on these
kippus, but it seems like that's another Imean, do you think?
I mean, is there any way to ever findclear understanding of the records of
(54:19):
khipus or is that just a futile pursuit?
No, I would never say that.
I would never say that.
I mean, it certainly is a challenge.
And I don't have a clear sense of how toanswer the question of what were the most
(54:42):
complex forms of information recorded inthe Kee -poos.
But I mean, there are a lot of peopleworking on it.
There's a lot of research being done, alot of
computerizing of the very careful study ofthe 1 ,000, 1 ,050, or 100 or so examples
(55:07):
that exist today.
There's a lot of information in those.
They've all been, most of them that arenot too fragile to be studied have been
studied now.
And there's a lot of computer analysisgoing on.
I think that, I mean, then we've gottensome pretty good, clear understanding now
(55:35):
of the numerical records, of how they weregoing about recording, like, census data,
how they were recording data pertainingto, like, the storage of agricultural
produce and...
the number of workers who were working onstate projects and a lot of stuff that has
(56:00):
a numerical value, a numerical signature,let's say.
And that's many things in the world.
That information's all there.
And I think we will eventually be able toidentify a wide range of the
(56:23):
numerical notation patterns that will helpus reconstruct some of the core principles
of the Inca empire.
Whether we will ever be able to read onesthat, let's say, contain stories about the
history of the origin of the Incas and howthe Incas themselves told that in their
(56:45):
coding of knots and colors and numbers.
I'm hopeful, but I don't...
I don't see that happening in the nearterm.
Right.
Is there any current, are there any kippusin existence that are clearly linked to
celestial objects or constellations or anyof the astronomy and things that we've
(57:10):
been talking about?
Great question.
We have only two khipus that I'm aware ofthat we can say pretty unambiguously
record calendrical data.
And though one is from the far north ofPeru in Chachapoyas, one is from the south
(57:32):
coast of Peru.
But.
I think what's important here is torecognize that there was an
extraordinarily large number of numericalvalues that were recorded and that are now
(58:01):
represented in the surviving keepers.
So hundreds of thousands of numericalvalues.
and they're just sitting there, they're onstrings, they're on knotted strings.
And for the most part, we would have tosay we don't really know what they refer
to, you know, unless there is somepattern, like a repeated pattern of
(58:25):
numbers, we can recognize that.
We also have some cases where groups ofvalues on a set of strings,
are tied to another string like a parentstring that contains the sum of the value
on that group of strings.
(58:45):
So we have some cases like that.
And we have also we here we have to notethat when the Spaniards came into Peru
following 1532, they
they were, they very quickly conquered theIncas and they became very interested in
(59:14):
how the Incas organized their empire.
They recognized that if they were toinherit the empire, take it over, conquer
it and use it, you know, it was too vastto just like kill off all the Incas and
then, you know, repopulate the land.
So they had to learn how the Incas had
(59:35):
organize this territory.
So they actually began systematicallycalling in khipu keepers, the bureaucratic
officials of the empire who kept thekhipus, and had them read the khipus to
them.
And then they would read it in theirindigenous language and a translator would
translate it into Spanish and a scribewould write down a version of what was
(01:00:03):
recorded on the khipu.
Wow.
That's what we have now.
We have several hundred of thosetranscribed keepers.
And for the most part, we know theypertain to economic records, to
bureaucratic records, numbers of workers,amount of labor that was given, the number
(01:00:29):
of resources that were collected.
And then here you get
like the Incas continued to recordinformation on the Quipus after the
Spanish conquest.
And so you begin to get a mix of recordsof pre -Inca times with colonial times.
So things get quite complicated at thispoint.
(01:00:50):
But to answer your question, like I thinkthat in those transcribed Quipus, we have
our best possible source.
for actually translating some of the morenarrative types of information recorded in
(01:01:11):
the Kipus.
Gosh, what a just extraordinary, you know,I think a lot of times we just assume with
history, it's so much cleaner and easier.
And as soon as you begin to get into anyof this, you realize like, I mean, if
you're not, you know, you need, you need abunch of linguists who are arguing over
(01:01:34):
what, you know, catch a word was, youknow,
translated into Spanish and you needsomeone who's looking at the mythology
aspect, you need someone who's looking atthe calendar and the stars and the
society.
I mean it just gets so, so complex soquickly to try and understand any of this
stuff.
(01:01:55):
Right, that's true.
And it's why it's not a task for anindividual, but it's a task for a
community of people working together tomake advances.
So I'm going to have to move on prettyquick.
(01:02:17):
Yeah.
no worries.
Well, we could go on forever, so we couldactually, we could call it here for today,
but I'm gonna have to have you on again,Gary, because we got a lot more to go
through.
Okay, I'll be happy to talk to you,Justin.
I enjoyed the conversation.
Thank you for the very good questions.
(01:02:40):
And yeah, so let's stay in touch.
I'd be happy to do more.
Yeah, for sure.
And I'm going to be, and I'm working onsome kind of citizen science projects down
here.
So I'm actually, hopefully going to go forthe Pleiades viewing in June for the
weather forecasting for the coming months.
But I'll stay in touch.
I'm going to be shipping you questionshere and there that I have that hopefully
(01:03:02):
you can give me perspective on as well.
And I just, I'd love to, to keep it goingand I'll let you know all the things that,
you know, I found a,
Well, it was professor just though whoactually just really quickly to give you a
reference point There's a there's aprofessor here.
He's probably in his Who still must be inhis 80s, maybe even his 90s, but the dude
(01:03:26):
books it up the mountain faster than I canand he
He was a biologist at the university, butthen he retired and he's more of like an
herbalist now.
And he takes people up into the mountainsand shows them all the different medicinal
plants and things like that.
(01:03:46):
And I went on this walk with him and Istarted asking him kind of these calendar
questions and he just lit up and got veryexcited.
yeah, he just said, you know, if you hearthe fox at this time, but it's,
If it makes a sound that's more, you know,chattery, that's different than if it
(01:04:07):
makes a sound, if it's, you know, clearand consistent about the weather.
And if the ducks are putting their eggsnear the river, you know, that means this
or this and that.
And he goes, you know, and then he goes,well, you know, there's, there's books on
these things.
And he goes, he goes, he goes, Gary, GaryErton, you know, he, and he doesn't speak
any English.
He only speaks Spanish and Ketchum.
(01:04:28):
He goes, Gary Erton.
And so I took down your name that day andI came home and I opened up my Google Docs
of all these people that I want tointerview.
And sure enough, your name was already inthere from about eight months ago.
I had come across your work about eightmonths ago.
And then Professor Husto mentioned youagain.
And so that's when I definitely had toreach out.
(01:04:50):
I'm so honored to hear that a fellow likethat would reference me.
That's very heartwarming.
Thank you, Justin, for that.
love to meet him.
He actually just recently found a new siteoutside Cusco that he's been working to
protect and he's actually fighting withthe government and he's working with the
(01:05:11):
local community because the government waskind of trying to just exploit it for
tourism immediately and he's trying tokeep it a little protected for some time.
Yeah, but yep.
Okay, take care.
I'll see you.
we'll keep talking.
Okay, bye -bye.
Not sure how to get out.
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